Reading De La Costa
A hundred and one years ago, Horacio de la Costa was born in Mauban, Quezon. He was smart, articulate, a certified genius. He studied at the Ateneo and was the toast of his generation, a superstar when stardom was measured in intellectual prowess, honors earned, debates won, and other cerebral accomplishments. He could have been anything he wanted to be and he would have shone. So powerful was his intellect, so profuse were his talents, he could have been a playwright, a senator or a Supreme Court justice, maybe even President. His father, a judge, wanted him to be a lawyer who would be his partner in his law firm. But all he wanted to be was a Jesuit.
He studied, taught and wrote history. He wrote radio dramas and stage plays. He helped legislators and presidents be the best they could be, mentoring them and ghost writing their speeches. He became the first Filipino provincial of the Jesuits in the Philippines. Later, he was sent to Rome to assist the head of the Jesuits in the world, the so-called Black Pope. The Pope even considered making him a bishop — and what a prelate he would have made, had he not begged that he be excluded from the list of aspirants.
So humble and low-key after all the high offices he assumed in the Jesuit order, all he wanted to do in the last years of his life was teach. Fr. De la Costa died of cancer 40 years ago before he turned 61. He is buried in the Jesuit cemetery at the Sacred Heart Novitiate in Novaliches.
Today, few people outside of historians are aware that there once walked on this earth a giant of a man such as Horacio de la Costa. At the Ateneo, where an academic building is named after him, he is known to the students only as the smiling bronze statue of a man in a cassock standing along the red brick road on campus.
Fr. Catalino Arevalo, SJ, who was De la Costa’s student at the Ateneo and in the novitiate, decries the lack of knowledge of De la Costa’s work and worth in the university, and even among young Jesuit seminarians.
The Ateneo de Manila University honored Fr. De la Costa on his centennial last year, with a lecture series on different aspects of his life and work. The weekly event spanned three months where his legacy was examined in lectures by Fr. Arevalo, Fr. Rene Javellana, SJ, Vince Rafael, Rey Ileto, Fr. Mario Francisco, SJ, Fernando Zialcita, Coeli Barry, DJ de Jesus, Benito Legarda, John Labella, and myself. A year later, on May 3, 2017, six days before his 101st birthday today, the Ateneo Press launched the book documenting the lectures, Reading Horacio de la Costa, SJ: Views from the 21st Century, edited by Professor Soledad Reyes.
The purpose of the lecture series was to introduce De la Costa to generations of Filipinos, especially today’s millennials, who would probably not get to know of him otherwise. Now, this book has been published to reach to a bigger audience. But it can’t end there.
The Ateneo must explore other means of presenting De la Costa to millennials, and even older generations who may have missed being amazed by his humanity and brilliant scholarship. I want to see the emergence of documentaries, short films, even comic books on his life, work and times, that illustrate his relevance in our lives today.
As Fr. Jett Villarin, SJ wrote in his introduction to the book, “In the process of articulating the key issues of the past — increasing secularization, the role of the Church in a changing world, the quest for identity, the interconnectedness between the past and the present, the impact of warring socio-political forces on society, among others — De la Costa took up the major concerns that a deeply divided nation struggles to address even now.”
For starters, Anvil Publishing has released a small illustrated book on the life of Fr. De la Costa, The Playful Genius by Neni Sta. Romana Cruz. It is an easy introduction for young readers who, hopefully, will want to know more and go on to read the lecture series, the four-volume compilation by Roberto Paterno of De la Costa’s writings, and his seminal work on the history of the Jesuits in the Philippines. I am told, there is a lot more he has written that has not been published.
Perhaps De la Costa’s most revered work among the Jesuits is the draft of “Jesuits Today” which he was commissioned to write for the 32nd General Congregation in Rome in 1974. In it, he defined succinctly what it means to be a Jesuit: “It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus, as Ignatius was…”; and as a companion of Jesus, “to engage, under the standard of the cross, the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith, and that struggle for justice which it includes.”
Fr. De la Costa has much to share with present generations on what it means to be Filipino — and Catholic. But we have to get to know him better.
Reading Horacio de la Costa is published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. Call 426-5984 for orders. HEART & MIND by Paulynn Sicam
